“You’re standing on a site where enslaved people were warehoused.” These words, written on the wall of the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, welcome visitors to a large hall where pictures, short films and simulated images speak of the horrors of slavery in America. The 11,000 sq ft museum, opened on April 26 by Montgomery’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organisation, leads the visitor through the history of slavery, and the lynching, segregation and mass incarceration of African-Americans. Inside the museum, visitors can hear recordings of death row inmates and simulated images of slaves in dark cells describing their stories. The EJI has collected soil from lynching sites across the U.S. and kept them in glass jars labelled with the victim’s name and the location where he or she was killed.
A few blocks away is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to thousands of victims of lynching in America, many of whose names are not known. The EJI has catalogued about 4,400 racial lynching events in the U.S. Inside the memorial complex are 800 steel columns with photographs of lynched women hanging from trees and lamp poles, a chilling reminder of an era of racist terror. Inscribed on each column is the name of an American county and the people lynched there, along with grisly stories of how they were killed. One man was lynched for carrying a photograph of a white woman, and a pregnant black woman was burnt alive for protesting the lynching of her husband. Rachel Judge, a Staff Attorney at the EJI, told a group of visiting Indian journalists at the organisation’s headquarters in Montgomery that the purpose of the museum and the memorial was to keep the dark memories of America alive. This was not to punish America but “to liberate it,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder of the EJI.
There is poetic justice in the memorial and the museum being established in Montgomery: the city, on the shores of the Alabama River, had a huge slave market during the slavery era. Slaves were ferried in and out via the river. When slave-owning states revolted against Washington, Montgomery was named the first capital of the Confederacy. Its memorials are still preserved in the city, including the Confederacy White House, a few yards away from the State Capitol.
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Ms. Judge said the mission of the EJI is to fight the continuing institutionalised discrimination against minorities. About 26% of the state’s population are African-American, but they make up 54% of the state’s prison population. In Alabama, being black means that the chances of getting stopped by the police are higher, said Howard Robinson at the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture, Alabama University. He said in the current political climate in the U.S. the movement for civil rights has become more difficult, referring to the rise of Donald Trump and the emboldening of white supremacist groups.
The writer is the International Affairs Editor of The Hindu and recently visited the U.S.